The Tree Stump

This is a true story. I know because I was there.

When I was about 6 years old, my older brother Timmy was always in trouble. He liked to play pranks and make mischief, and he was always being punished. He got spankings, he was grounded, he had his toys taken away — but nothing seemed to stop him from misbehaving.

One summer he got in grounded for painting the ceiling in hid bedroom. He was so mad at our mom for grounding him that he decided to run away from home. Sort of.

Timmy wasn’t very brave, though, so his idea of running away from home was really just running into the woods behind our house for a while, until he clamed down. Then he would come back and apologize, and most of the time our mom would forgive him.

This time, though, he went in a different direction. He crashed through the trees, breaking branches and clearing his own path through the woods as they got deeper and denser and darker. On the other side of a shallow stream he saw an old, rotted tree stump. It was about three feet high and almost two feet wide. The tree stump seemed to be bleeding oil or tar — it looked like black liquid was running all over it.

When Timmy got closer, though he saw the tree stump was just crawling with big, black ants. They were bigger than the little ants in the anthills near our house. He saw one ant all by itself, crawling toward his sneaker, and he lifted his foot and stomped it dead.

The second his foot crushed the big, black ant it appeared that all of the other ants on the tree stump stopped moving — just for an instant — as if they knew what had happened.

Timmy picked up the big, dead ant and looked at it. It was almost an inch long, and it had six black legs, a shiny black body, and a little black head with a mouth made of sharp jaws. He sneered at it and, holding it in the flat palm of his left hand, shot it toward the tree stump with a sharp flick of his right index finger.

After that, whenever Timmy got punished for causing trouble, he would run back out to that tree stump and find a single ant on its own and stomp it. Or smack it. Or pick it up and squish it by clapping it between his hands.

Near the end of the summer, Timmy was running through the house, which he’d been told a hundred times not to do. He ran around a chair in the living room and crashed into the coffee table, causing it to collapse, and on it was one of our mom’s favorite glass bowls. Our mom grabbed him and forced him to go to his room. She didn’t let him pretend to run away this time, instead she made sure he was in his bedroom and she told him he would have to go to bed without dinner, and maybe that would teach him to behave.

Instead, he climbed out his bedroom window and headed back out into the woods. It was almost evening, though, and the woods seemed different and scarier as the shadows of sunset crawled like spiders through the trees.

Timmy got to the tree stump and to his surprise it was completely still. Not an ant in sight. He picked up a stick that was lying nearby and poked it into the rotted wood. The stick went right into it, like pushing a finger into a big chunk of cake.

Still no ants.

He swung the stick at the tree stump and a few bits of the stump flew into the air.

Still no ants.

He walked closer to the tree stump and kicked it. His foot caved in part of it, so he kicked it even harder. He took a step back and ran at it, like he when played kick ball, and he swung his foot so hard that the stump just exploded into the night. Rotted wood went everywhere and, like a volcano’s hot lava, a gushing geyser of ants also erupted from the tree stump, covering Timmy’s arms and legs and hands and neck and head and even his face.

The ants worked like one giant monster, thousands of them with their little black feet and sharp black jaws, and — like one giant monster — the ants swallowed Timmy down into the tree stump. He disappeared through the rotted wood, and there was no sign of him afterwards.

I’ve never seen him again, but I hear rumors of a giant ant hunting in the woods. Every now and then I bring a sandwich with me, and I walk out to that rotted tree stump. Careful not to step on any ants, I leave the sandwich as close to the stump as I dare and then I turn and run.

The last time I went I walked a little slower when I left. Wondering if Timmy was still in there somewhere. I thought I heard a little voice say “thank you,” so I turned around. The sandwich was gone, and in the shadows of the trees, I saw a long black leg disappear into the rotted wood of the tree stump.